psychology

It can be hard, though, to accept that morality motivates violence. Maybe there’s something wrong with thinking of violence as moral. Isn’t the point of morality to care for people, or at least not hurt them?

We are told that a “surprising new scientific theory explains why morality leads to violence.” It turns out that people are willing to be violent over the things they care most deeply about, especially if those things are considered rare and irreplaceable. I suppose this is “surprising” to anyone raised in a Skinner box, unacquainted with the great philosopher-poets who already addressed this inherent shapeshifting, transitory, mysterious nature of life long ago:

“How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the will to truth out of the will to deception? Or selfless action out of self-interest? Or the pure sunlike gaze of the sage out of covetousness? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, even worse; the things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this turmoil of delusion and desire! Rather from the lap of being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the ‘thing-in-itself ‘—there must be their basis, and nowhere else!”— This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudice by which the metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this “belief” that they trouble themselves about “knowledge,” about something that is finally christened solemnly as “the truth.” The fundamental belief of the metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them to raise doubts right here at the threshold where it is surely most necessary: even if they vowed to themselves, “de omnibus dubitandum.” For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and second, whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use? For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to appearance, the will to deception, self-interest, and desire. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence. Perhaps! — But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous Perhapses!

To be fair, the article also contains a quote that refutes Washam’s position entirely. Jesee Vega Frey, a teacher at Vipassana Hawaii says, “It is the wanting of things to be other than they are that is the heart of our imprisonment. Changing the colors, textures, and flavors of the prison doesn’t lead to freedom.” Unfortunately, this quote is buried in an article filled with rah-rah hype for the use of drugs.

…Why do we want things to be other than they are? Why do we feel we have plateaued? We long for fundamental change, but what is it we most need to fundamentally change? Could it be that our desire for something else is the root of our problem? Could it be that satisfying that desire with something that looks like spiritual progress is the very worst thing we could possibly do — not just to ourselves but to everyone around us?

Rather than running off to find new experiences to relieve the boredom of meditation, maybe it would be better to dive deeply into that boredom and find out where it comes from and whether it really needs relieving.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been attempting to do some self-improvement. I decided that I got stressed and lost my temper too easily, and that I should work on being more sanguine and unruffled, possibly even cheerful. My primary inspiration in this was the Lady of the House’s example. She exudes a confident, buoyant, patient optimism to a degree I’ve never seen in anyone else. Time and time again, I’ve felt foolish for having watched her straightforwardly solve a problem that I had abandoned in frustration or anger. The philosopher and relationship counselor Rocky Balboa famously discussed his “gaps” theory of a successful relationship: “She’s got gaps, I got gaps; together, we fill gaps, I dunno.” Likewise, the Lady filled this particular gap in my character, and for that, I’ve tried to show my gratitude by striving to give her less work to do in that regard. A reliable teammate should inspire you to strive harder to be worthy of them, not to ride on their coattails.

Now, I want to make clear that it’s not like I had a serious problem or anything. I wasn’t getting into fights or screaming matches or putting my fist through walls and windows. I was just tired of allowing petty irritations to live rent-free in my head and thought a little Stoic equanimity would be a good thing to strive for. It was only a little tinkering, not a major renovation.

And yet, and yet. It turns out that even this minor adjustment is hard. At first it was flabbergasting, then slightly dismaying, to see how often I slipped right back into old habits of getting too easily frustrated. I would reflect at the end of another less-than-stellar day on how, once again, everything turned out all right after all, how getting angry didn’t help at all, and how I could do better the next time. And when the red mist would descend the next time, I would struggle mightily to remember: what was I supposed to do again to calm down here? Why am I not supposed to curse or otherwise betray my irritation? All my careful philosophical preparation was nowhere to be found when a stormy mood arrived.

Eventually, you start to notice other things beside your immediate failures: the ways in which your parents influenced you much more than you ever thought; the ways in which old coping behaviors from a poisonous relationship hardened into regular practices before calcifying into unconscious habits; the mystifying sense of near-powerlessness, like a rider on a bucking bronco, which comes as an unpleasant shock to the ego. What begins as a project of willpower seeking to assert itself becomes a realization of how deluded we often are in imagining that we can shape life to our liking. As Brad has said many times about Buddhist meditation, strange, unnerving things happen when you refuse to allow your mind its usual escape routes and insist on paying bare attention to what is. All I wanted was a minor upgrade on my temperament! I didn’t ask to have the wind knocked out of me by the realization of how much time I wasted thoughtlessly acting out old, lazy patterns of behavior!

The ability to envision and move toward alternative ways of being is both the blessing and the curse of the human experience. It’s made us the amazing, dynamic species we are, and it’s also left us unable to rest content with whatever actually exists. There’s always something better somewhere else, we think. Whatever is is never enough. As W.H. Auden said, “With envy, terror, rage, regret/we anticipate or remember but never are.”

Several years ago, the social/technology critic Evgeny Morozov said that in order to maximize his productivity, he bought a safe with a timed combination lock which he used to lock up his phone and router so that he would have no means of procrastinating when he had work that needed to get done. Nicholas Carr, a frequent target of Morozov’s snarky jabs and brash criticisms, couldn’t help snickering at what he took to be further proof of his famous assertion that digital media is negatively affecting our brains and corroding our ability to concentrate. Morozov’s argument, though, was that locking away his Internet access was simply the most efficient way to allocate his mental resources. If temptation is immediately at hand, it will require a constant effort to refuse it. If temptation isn’t even allowed anywhere in the vicinity, though, it can be put completely out of mind. Sure, if you need to prove a point to yourself, you can make a show of resisting temptation even as it dances tantalizingly in your face, but it’s a lot easier to simply plan in advance to avoid it in the first place.

Progressives are all aflutter over the news that Mike Pence refuses to dine alone with a woman other than his wife, and he refuses to attend events where alcohol is served without his wife accompanying him. The reflexive assumptions seem to be, a) Evangelicals sure are weirdos, hurr hurr, and b) What kind of freak goes to such extreme lengths to avoid temptation, and what does that tell us about him, since we’re apparently still taking Freudian theories of repression seriously?

Again, some people seem to think that temptation should be constantly faced and overcome through a pure, singular act of will in order to prove one’s character, and that anything else is some sort of cowardice or weakness. Often, though, the most effective way to neutralize one vice is through another vice, rather than through pure virtue. If gluttony is your problem, perhaps vanity might be the cure — I know of one fellow who claims to have an insatiable junk food addiction, which magically goes away when someone he knows is around to see him. Apparently his strong desire to be thought well of by others can pacify his urge to gobble candy bars by the dozen. Or perhaps laziness might do the trick — if you refuse to keep junk food in your house while attempting to lose weight, the thought of making a special trip into town when cravings arise just to buy ice cream and chocolate might not seem worth the effort. If you can win the short battle against temptation while actually at the grocery store, you save yourself from fighting a long war of attrition against the enemy in the kitchen. Fight smarter, not harder, in other words.

Pence’s desire to avoid even the appearance of impropriety could just as easily spring from honor, prudence, or rational wisdom as from the baser motives that many seem eager to impute to him. I don’t know or care either way. Human beings are a battleground of competing drives, forever divided against themselves, and only appear coherent through the mythology of hindsight. I am not a Christian, but having outgrown the juvenile urge to sneer at religion as a fairy tale for the feeble minded, I can appreciate that an evangelical Christian with a belief in humankind’s inherent sinfulness (a belief I share in the spirit if not in the letter) would see no shame in relying on such rules to guide his social conduct, rather than pridefully insisting on pure willpower to carry him through. Fighting smarter, perhaps.

From Condorcet and Comte down to their latter-day disciples like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, rationalists have dreamed of turning ethics into a science. If only ethics could be turned into a quantifiable, data-driven exercise, then knowing the right thing to do in any given circumstance would be a simple matter of plugging objective numerical values into a mathematical formula, a technique that could be mastered and used by anyone, with none of this primitive, inefficient, peasant superstition about “wisdom” which can only be gradually acquired over time, through trial and error, and by listening to boring old elders and their interminable stories.

As it happens, though, ethics is more like an exclusive nightclub named Dunbar’s Number, guarded by glowering, musclebound bouncers. “The right thing to do” involves flesh-and-blood people in specific relationships based in particular contexts, not abstract people in an abstract world. There is no a priori answer to every moral dilemma, unless you’re a believer in predestination or absolute determinism.

Let’s stare in amazement as Adam Waytz attempts to square this circle:

In fact, there is a terrible irony in the assumption that we can ever transcend our parochial tendencies entirely. Social scientists have found that in-group love and out-group hate originate from the same neurobiological basis, are mutually reinforcing, and co-evolved—because loyalty to the in-group provided a survival advantage by helping our ancestors to combat a threatening out-group. That means that, in principle, if we eliminate out-group hate completely, we may also undermine in-group love. Empathy is a zero-sum game.

Absolute universalism, in which we feel compassion for every individual on Earth, is psychologically impossible. Ignoring this fact carries a heavy cost: We become paralyzed by the unachievable demands we place on ourselves. We can see this in our public discourse today. Discussions of empathy fluctuate between worrying that people don’t empathize enough and fretting that they empathize too much with the wrong people. These criticisms both come from the sense that we have an infinite capacity to empathize, and that it is our fault if we fail to use it.

People do care, newspaper editorialists and social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for victims of Brussels’ recent attacks and ignoring Yemen’s recent bombing victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote, than the ones that attract the most public empathy. Almost any attempt to draw attention to some terrible event in the world elicits these complaints, as though misallocated empathy was more consequential than the terrible event itself. If we recognized that we have a limited quantity of empathy to begin with, it would help to cure some of the acrimony and self-flagellation of these discussions. The truth is that, just as even the most determined athlete cannot overcome the limits of the human body, so too we cannot escape the limits of our moral capabilities.

We must begin with a realistic assessment of what those limits are, and then construct a scientific way of choosing which values matter most to us.

That means we need to abandon an idealized cultural sensitivity that gives all moral values equal importance. We must instead focus our limited moral resources on a few values, and make tough choices about which ones are more important than others. Collectively, we must decide that these actions affect human happiness more than those actions, and therefore the first set must be deemed more moral than the second set.

Once we abandon the idea of universal empathy, it becomes clear that we need to build a quantitative moral calculus to help us choose when to extend our empathy. Empathy, by its very nature, seems unquantifiable, but behavioral scientists have developed techniques to turn people’s vague instincts into hard numbers.

Basing our moral criteria on maximizing happiness is not simply a philosophical choice, but rather a scientifically motivated one: Empirical data confirm that happiness improves physical health, enhancing immune function and reducing stress, both of which contribute to longevity. Shouldn’t our moral choice be the one that maximizes our collective well-being? These data sets can give us moral “prostheses,” letting us evaluate different values side-by-side—and helping us to discard those lesser values that obstruct more meaningful ones. These approaches can help us create a universal moral code—something that can serve as a moral guide in all cases, even if we are not able to actually apply it to all people all the time.

As Arthur said via email:

My take-away is that the solution to our moral problems is to be happy. The only way to solve moral problems in a realistic way is to apply a data-driven hedonistic calculus — which is what a lot of amoral people do, anyway. There is something of an antinomy between morality as an absolute — “It’s the right thing to do, come hell or high water” — and morality as relativistic, based on trade-offs between consequences of this or that course of action. The antinomy between these two concepts of morality is itself a moral one. But it is also a philosophical question, and the problem with so many social scientists is their technocratic hubris. They assume science has solved or soon will solve the problems that philosophy could only speculate about, given that Kant and Plato, e.g., were cluelessly embedded in a primitive stage in history, bereft of the only means of testing philosophical hypotheses: lab testing and data-gathering. But philosophical questions keep coming back to bite them in the ass.

Utilitarian ethics are ruthlessly fixated on practical results — whatever is best for the greatest number of people. The problem with this position that it is not in itself necessarily moral: it is based on an unexamined assumption that everyone is a reasonable modern Liberal. and that what will make the greatest number of people happy could never be, for example, exterminating the Jews. Utilitarian and Marxist thinking converge here in consensus group-think, collectivist notions of happiness, and disregard or contempt for individual deviations from “the general good.” Both make claims to being scientific. Both are programmatically devoted to humane values such as social justice. And while it is Marxist “dialectical science” (along with Nazi “racial science”) that has produced totalitarian nightmares, there’s potential for a more laid-back dystopia in utilitarian thinking. Or perhaps we are going to end up with a dystopia that combines the best of 1984 with the best of Brave New World.

But who’s to say you can’t engineer efficient empathy-extension? And I’ll be interested to hear how that FBI-vs.-Apple dilemma is solved by neuroscientists and social psychologists. First, of course, they’ll need to poll the People using improved self-reporting techniques; image their brains to measure their anxiety-vs.-emotional security ratios; and use a software algorithm to produce a rigorous break-even analysis. The result will be a democratic (or at least demographic) moral decision, overseen by guess who? An elite cadre of scientists and social engineers. It’s not as if these disinterested people are motivated by any WILL TO POWER.

Do we still have the capacity, as a political and intellectual movement, to argue in a way that’s not entirely based on associating with race or gender in a totally vague, unaccountable, and reductive way?

Magic 8-ball says…?

He continues:

If you want us to stop being a mess, you have to be willing to criticize, and you have to accept that every criticism of an ostensibly progressive argument is not some terrible political betrayal. Not everyone who complains about white people has enlightened racial attitudes. Not everyone who constantly drops “mansplaining” or “gaslighting” into conversation actually helps fight sexism. One-liners don’t build a movement. Being clever doesn’t fix the world. Scoring points on Twitter doesn’t create justice. Jokes make nothing happen. We’re speeding for a brutal backlash and inevitable political destruction, if not in 2016 then 2018 or 2020. If you want to help avoid that, I suggest you invest less effort in trying to be the most clever person on the internet and more on being the hardest working person in real life. And stop mistaking yourself for the movement.

Matt Taibbi once offered a hypothesis about the psychology of this self-defeating tendency:

That’s why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen… Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people — and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here’s the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn’t matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn’t a policy imposed from above; it’s an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You’re arguing the particulars, where you’re right, while they’re arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.

Of course, as you may have noticed by the references to God and swiftboating, the original context had Taibbi attributing this mentality to fundamentalist Christians in particular and Republicans in general. If you leave that partisan bias aside, you can’t help but notice that “making sure the argument never stops” is also the emotional imperative driving the online dynamics among progressives that Freddie has been criticizing in vain lo these many years. The point of all their sound and fury is not to end misogyny or racism; the point is to keep finding new sources and hiding places of those social ills in order to ensure that the fun of denouncing and posturing never has to stop. The web is not a place for serious political action. It’s a kennel full of baying hounds, desperate to be let loose after the scent of social injustice. The thrill of the hunt is what they live for.

It feels a little frustrating that a site like Salon that I used to always go to for great news, great commentary, did turn into a caricature of what a lot of really dumb conservatives used to say it was. That’s really disturbing to me because I don’t want it to be. And I’ve been saying this over and over again.

I asked, “Is there any way to be critical of this “callout culture” without sounding like a whiny white male who is sad that he can’t tell racist jokes anymore?” And she told me, “No. So just go ahead and do it.” I’m sure some people will take it that way. And that is unfortunate, because I honestly think there is a balance that could be struck between making sure that closet racists, woman-haters, etc are made known and this kind of obsession with finding something Wrong with everyone. And yes, I think someone sifting through five years of tweets upon first hearing of a comedian is, if not legitimately obsessive, at least on the Obsession Spectrum.

We are addicted to the rush of being offended and we love tearing down our idols. Always have, always will. I’m not going to join the Patton Oswalt brigade of “Oh dear, You People are so sensitive that it’s silencing my white male voice!”

George Carlin famously joked about how everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac. As in so many instances, George was making us laugh while imparting a deep truth about human nature to us: We all picture ourselves occupying the sensible, moderate, middle ground; we all imagine ourselves to be the embodied avatar of clear-eyed common sense. Personally, I think this tendency is hardwired into our psychology. It comes standard with the narrative-maker we all use to make sense of the world. Everybody, no matter how nuts they are, thinks there are clowns to the left of them and jokers to the right.

Like the Bible says, then, as ye triangulate, so shall ye be triangulated against. Oswalt wants to take pains to differentiate himself from the “dumb conservatives” who were criticizing the excesses of progressive piety a long time ago, which kind of prompts the question of how dumb they really are if they were wise to this well in advance of him, but we’ll let that slide. Ed tries to heed the wise words of his friend, but a mere few sentences later, his weak nerve breaks and he realizes that he doesn’t have to outrun the social justice mob, he only has to outrun Patton Oswalt, so he slaps a PRIVILEGE RULES, SOCIAL JUSTICE DROOLS sign on Oswalt’s back and takes off at a sprint.

Salon is indeed a worthless leftish tabloid, so good on Oswalt for giving ’em the what-for. And the rest of Ed’s post is perfectly agreeable, so huzzah to him for saying it. Overall, there’s far more positives than negatives in those two links. But like Ben Franklin said, you fellows might want to learn how to hang together, or you will assuredly hang separately. Look, I speak as one who has spent a few years waging solo guerilla warfare deep behind enemy lines here. I returned with a very simple message: If there is ever to be a viable alternative to technocratic, corporate-friendly, neoliberal Democrats or rabid, corporate-friendly, reactionary Republicans, it sure as shit is not going to spring from the barren, toxic soil of intersectional identity politics. Therefore, there is no need to placate these people or make excuses for them. If you are critical of them at all and significant enough to attract their attention, they will eventually treat you the same way they’ve treated all those other racist, misogynist, right-wing shitlords, many of whom, funny enough, considered themselves liberals in good standing right up until the moment they found themselves being publicly denounced and ostracized. If you think this only happens to people who “deserve” it, that your obvious reasonableness and unimpeachable credibility will prevent such a travesty from ever happening to you, then you’re a fool, and I hope for your sake you’re not active on social media.

But then there are the people Nicholas Carr interviewed, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it — who can’t get back, as Lucy Pevensie for a time can’t get back to Narnia: what was an opening to another world is now the flat planked back of a wardrobe. They’re the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it…I don’t know whether an adult who has never practiced deep attention — who has never seriously read for information or for understanding, or even for delight — can learn how. But I’m confident that anyone who has ever had this facility can recover it: they just have to want that recovery enough to make sacrifices for it, something they will only do if they can vividly recall what that experience was like.

What do I want? What do I need? Why do I want it? What’s in it for me? Thus did the Beastie Boys provide us with a rhythmic, rhyming conceptual framework for investigating those goals which remain unmet despite our professed intentions.

Jacobs talks earlier in the book about the different reasons why people read. Some people are after an experience of raptness, of being immersed in a book to the point of forgetting to eat dinner or go to bed on time. But some are not so much interested in reading books as in having read them — books are merely instrumental, a means by which to have improved one’s character, raised one’s I.Q., or boosted one’s status. (Both tendencies can coexist in the same individual at different times, of course; I speak from experience.)

We understand this in other contexts. Some people genuinely enjoy exercise, and being fit is just a nice bonus for something they would do anyway. Some people would like to have exercised, and would like for other people to see them as fit, but aren’t so keen on actually doing it. They like the idea of being healthy and slender, but they also like the experience of relaxing and indulging. The irresistible force of their vanity meets the immovable object of their laziness.

Being conflicted like that is, I would suggest, much more of a “natural” human state than being highly motivated and disciplined. We vacillate between different impulses all the time. We desire mutually exclusive things and avoid making a hard choice between them. We fear that what we really want isn’t what we should want. Our tastes and appetites change over time. And we inevitably frame our choices in the most flattering way possible. No, really, I would have exercised if not for… Honestly, I love reading books, but these gadgets, see, they’re rewired my brain…

We feel the trembling uncertainty along these fault lines in our character and hurriedly dash back to the safety of such comforting narratives. But it is precisely those cracks in the tectonic plates of our personality which invite us to explore a little deeper. What if you’re not truly the person you thought you were, or the person you’d like to be? Would that be such a bad thing? What are you willing to sacrifice to get there, then?

For the past week, I’ve been listening almost exclusively to the solo records of Mike Doughty, former singer for Soul Coughing. While looking for some additional insight into the man behind the music, I found this interview:

YOUNG: Do you think fame is an addiction?

DOUGHTY: The people I know who are really famous tend to be very disappointed people. They went into it thinking that when they got famous, they would feel good all the time. But then they became famous and they’re still just themselves. It can be a real bitter discovery for a lot of people. I have the advantage of having such a minor taste of fame, that I kind of know what it’s like, but it doesn’t completely fuck with me. But people are so mean to famous people. I’m not saying I want to hang out with them, but people say the meanest shit about these famous people they don’t know.

YOUNG: What did you feel the celebrity atmosphere was like in the ’90s versus this insane overexposure that people can achieve now?

DOUGHTY: My own experience with that brief moment where I had videos on MTV was that nothing was ever good enough. When you hear people say, “I was unhappy the whole time,” that sounds ridiculous. But literally everything that happened to me was like, “This isn’t good enough, because so-and-so has something better.” I think this is a theme among people who seek fame, not just musicians. There are a lot of bitter, disappointed people.

My life today is better than it was in, say, 2009. I can say that with confidence. I could even name several specific areas in which there has clearly been a marked improvement, from relationships to finances, without there being any corresponding setbacks. Yet, to be honest, I don’t really feel any different. Some of the things that gave me joy in 2009 are no longer so prominent in my life; conversely, some of the things that seemed like menacing crises turned out to be harmless phantoms. I meditate upon the reasons I have to be thankful, but in doing so, I can’t help but be aware of the myriad ways in which those blessings are beyond my control and could still turn to shit. Overall, life seems pretty well balanced between contentment and frustration, hope and fear. The individual elements constantly change, but the ratios always seem to remain the same.

I think this is a theme common to all people, not just fame-seekers. Fears rarely turn out to be as terrible as we imagined, and successes often turn out to be more ephemeral than we anticipated. I suppose you could say these are axiomatic truths for me: people often don’t know what they really want. In fact, their desires largely exist in relation to what other people have and want, rather than existing sui generis. If they’re lucky, they might stumble into satisfaction after a process of elimination, but it’s likely that they’ll spend their lives in vain pursuit of it, never realizing that anything they can actually possess will inevitably become boring and unsatisfactory. However, consciously accepting a life of perpetual novelty-chasing will come to seem equally empty. Neither indulgence nor resignation seem to provide a solution.

Progress can be meaningfully said to exist, at least in the material sense. The problem of how to cope with the stress of modern, sedentary existence in a consumer society seems, to me at least, to be a good problem to have. Not all tradeoffs are created equal. Psychologically, though, there is no correlate to material improvement, no way to estimate that “My life is at least 35% better than it was several years ago” and have it resonate in a satisfactory way. Like Tantalus, the things we want and the things we’ve lost will always seem to be agonizingly close, yet forever out of reach.

I am arguing that even many people who describe themselves or their goals in invulnerablist terms do not actually live or seek to live that way. The official doctrines, the ones that offer ultimate peace with oneself, a place of stillness that cannot be shaken, are in most cases a misrepresentation of what people are like or even what they want. Instead, something else is happening, something that involves some of the insights of invulnerabilist doctrines but does not embrace them in what I’m calling their official form.

…It seems to me that Taoism, Buddhism, Stoicism, etc. work not by making one invulnerable but rather by allowing one to step back from the immediacy of the situation so that the experience of pain or suffering is seen for what it is, precisely as part of a contingent process, a process that could have yielded a very different present but just happened to yield this one. This, of course, is not the official doctrine either, especially for Stoicism, for which the unfolding of the cosmos is a rational one. (Buddhists will periodically refer to the contingency of the cosmos’ unfolding; however, the concept of nirvana bends that contingency toward something more nearly rational, or at least just.) But it does seem to me to capture their common insight that there is so much about the world that we cannot control; seeking to master it is an illusion. We must learn instead to live with the process in all its contingency, even where we hope to change it for the better. And we must understand that for most of us suffering is inevitable. We can recognize all this and take solace from it without having to take the step of removing ourselves from the desires that lead to suffering.

That’s an interesting take on it — people, as usual, don’t really know what they want, and if they could actually achieve the invulnerability they think they want, they’d be unhappy in a whole new way. Fortunately for them, by aiming for invulnerability, they will inevitably fall short, but the effort itself will serve as a functional coping mechanism and the result will be good enough. Saved by their own confusion. In fact, perhaps too much clarity and self-awareness here could dispel the illusion and be detrimental to one’s mental health.

Soylent is the ultimate fast food – but it’s unclear why we feel such an intense need for more time. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, juggling the demands of family and several part-time jobs, you might well dream of having an extra day in the week. But I doubt whether many who are in this position would consider giving up meals in order to work even harder than they already do, and in any case they aren’t the people to whom the food replacement is being marketed. It’s those that are reasonably well off, and yet think of themselves as being chronically pressured, that are being targeted.

It’s worth asking how we’ve become as time-poor as we feel we are today. I’m old enough to remember discussions of 40 or 50 years ago about how we’d fill our days when most kinds of human labour were done by machines. Technology is largely a succession of time-saving devices. It’s strange, then, that an age of unprecedented technological advance should also be one of such acute time-poverty. Are we really dreaming of living more slowly? Or could it be that many of us are secretly addicted to the fast life?

One answer to these questions can be gleaned from the writings of the 17th Century mathematician Blaise Pascal, who invented the modern theory of probability and designed the world’s first urban mass transit system. In his Pensees, a series of reflections mostly devoted to religious topics, Pascal suggested that humans are driven by a need for diversion. A life that’s always time-pressed might seem a recipe for unhappiness, but in fact the opposite is true. Human beings are much more miserable when they have nothing to do and plenty of time in which to do it. When we’re inactive or slow down the pace at which we live, we can’t help thinking of features of our lives we’d prefer to forget – above all, the fact that we’re going to die. By being always on the move and never leaving ourselves without distraction, we can avoid such disturbing thoughts.

Similarly, the late-twentieth-century philosopher Alanis Morrissette questioned our ability to handle silence without thinking about our bills, our exes, our deadlines, or when we think we’re going to die, wondering if we merely suffer through it while longing for the next distraction. Well, she may not have been able to carry a tune to save her life, but she at least possessed more penetrating insight into the human psyche than a naïf like Nicholas Carr, who still gets called “essential reading” for peddling the sort of story that people love to hear, namely, that it’s not our fault we never wrote that novel, seized the day, sucked the marrow out of life; technology rewired our brains and took our fate out of our hands.

This becomes a convenient excuse to avoid the introspection which might reveal some unpleasant personal truths. Maybe I don’t enjoy reading books and living deliberately. Maybe I don’t have any deep and meaningful friendships. Maybe I actually prefer to spend my evenings watching reality TV and snacking on junk food. Maybe I just realize that professing higher aspirations is what people of a certain cultural class are expected to do, and I don’t have the courage to set myself against that. Maybe I’m just not particularly smart, brave, talented or special at all, and if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?

These are the sorts of questions that will never be raised if you take people at face value when they complain about forces beyond their control preventing them from realizing their dreams. People want mutually exclusive things all the time without seeming to be aware of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartedly encourage people to spend time reading, focusing, introspecting, and all those other qualities that comprise the “contemplative literate subject“. I aim for that ideal myself. Achieving it on my terms, however, has required some tradeoffs. I’ve turned down a few opportunities for career advancement, which has probably reduced my esteem in the eyes of others in addition to the obvious financial downside. One reason why I’ve never wanted to have children (another choice with at least some social disapproval) was because of the cost involved in raising them, which would make it difficult if not impossible to resist such career opportunities. I’ll buy my jeans from Goodwill for seven bucks apiece and have my $50 Kmart winter coat, which I’ve had for fifteen years, sewn and patched because I’d rather spend my disposable income on more books. (I’m not saying that’s a hardship, just that I definitely do not cut a dashing, fashionable figure, which seems to be an important thing to many people.) And even if you do succeed in carving out enough space in your life to cherish contemplation, you may feel lonely upon discovering that almost all your peers and friends have no time or desire to join you there.

I’m fortunate in that none of this is too heavy of a price for me to pay. But I don’t expect that most people can or should feel the same way. If you truly feel that your life is missing too much of the stuff that “really matters”, what hard choices are you prepared to make to change that? Call me pessimistic if you must, but I do believe that there’s a tragic dimension to life that needs to be confronted and accepted.

Abraham Maslow said that “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.” In the absence of that knowledge, people at least understand what it is they’re supposed to want and make impotent gestures in that direction which will, of course, do nothing to alleviate their existential aches.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.